No, I'm not telling you when I was there, and no, I'm not telling you why.
I was able to, once again, go to the newest National Park in the country, which coincidentally is called New River Gorge National Park. It was made a park in December 2020, so all you can be sure of is that I went there sometime between December 2020 and the date of this posting.
It's a park in West Virginia, so once again my travels took me to that state, which is beginning to grow on me. A very underrated state. This was a new part of the state to me, though, and a fairly remote part, which I am learning is true of many National Parks - it's only a few that are in the vicinity of major cities or else places that would otherwise be tourist draws on their own.
I arrived on [redacted] afternoon, checked into the hotel, then made my way to the bridge, which is the main point of interest for the park. I was following my Cuyahoga strategy of seeing the big draw right off the bat just in case time or weather prevented it later.
...didn't get the greatest photo with the sun facing me. Here's what facing away from the bridge looks like:
It's really a pretty stunning spot. Definitely passes the muster for getting the National Park designation. And here was the walkway down to that overlook:
Again, parallels to Cuyahoga.
While I technically stayed in Oak Hill, my main point of contact for the park was Fayetteville, the town directly adjacent to the bridge area and visitor center, and this town is where I got my dinner from that evening before retiring to my hotel room to do work involving Excel that I also won't go into detail about. So many secrets in this post!
The next morning I went out into the park proper to hike some trails and see some sights. First, I took the trail out to the Endless Wall, one of the sightseeing points and also a major draw for climbers, which is a group this park particularly caters to. Not my sport, but I can enjoy the sights:
I sat at that overlook and just took it in for a bit, before completing the trail and heading out. I wanted to do one more trail before lunch, so I picked Long Point overlook, which seemed to be one of the "main" trails. This is probably where I got my best views:
The trail had a pretty steep section toward the end, which going back up was rough, but the view was worth it.
Lunch followed, then the afternoon excursion. Nearby the park, but not technically within its boundaries, is the ruins of an old mining town, called Nuttallburg. Much of the town per se is completely gone, but a few structures remain, most prominently the Nuttallburg Tipple:
...which is very different from the Tuttallburg Nipple.
A tipple is, apparently, the apparatus that helps deliver the coal from up in the mountains, where the mine is, down to the train tracks, where it can be delivered to other places, and this one definitely reached way up beyond where I could see:
The journey there and back was not only lengthy, but took me on some of the backest of back roads I've ever been on, to the point that I frequently doubted whether cars were meant to go where I currently was. Arriving at a parking lot, however, assuaged my doubts. That said, the trip to Nuttallburg and back took up pretty much the rest of my afternoon. I returned to the hotel, got dinner, and then toward sunset, returned to the bridge to see if the sunlight would be a little less detrimental to the success of my photos:
Also, here's the visitor center:
The next morning, I left through the town of Beckley, where I had originally thought I might stay, but the closer and cheaper hotels were further north. Not much to report here, except a donut shop of the same franchise as one my family used to go to in Charlotte.
